David Farrowe

06/23/2010

My Afro wasn’t one of those gigantic spheres that blocked the view for people sitting behind me in the movie theater. But it was big and beautiful—except when I was writing. I had a nervous habit of playing with my hair while concentrating. Unconsciously, I pinched and twisted it between my thumb and fingers into braid-like baby spears that, after a while, created a big, burly Afro sprouting dwarf dreads. Samuele didn’t like the look.

“What is wrong with your head?” he asked.

I was writing. Right then, the existing world was all in my mind. I didn’t hear him. He thought I was ignoring him. He furiously banged the palm of his hand on the wall of my cubicle, disturbing the insurance-company quiet in the office.

“Pierce, did you hear me? What’s wrong with your head?”

“Nothing that a good shrink couldn’t fix,” I answered, thinking this was a good time for levity.

Samuele frowned at my joke while nodding in agreement with what I said.

“Let me repeat the question,” he said, in his usual whiny, high-pitched voice, ‘Why is your hair looking like that?’”

“Like what?” There were no mirrors in my cubicle, if there were, I would not have been surprised to see that Samuele had no reflection.

“Your head. It’s a disgrace,” he said. “Either you march into the men’s room right now and comb your hair or I’m going to tell Mr. Wilson Jr. that I had to send you home because your appearance was unacceptable.”

I shook my head. This was one for Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

“I’m serious. There are people passing by here on tours. You look like some plantation pickaninny. Like Buckwheat in his Sunday go-to-meeting suit.”

“Foolish me, I thought I was a Raven writer, not a Raven Style Galore model,” I said, slapping my face in mock surprise.

Then I went to the men’s room.

“You won’t believe what happened to me at the Outhouse today,” I announced to Allison as soon as I walked in the door. Depending on what was going on at WIPE, it was either the Fun House or the Outhouse.

“Let me guess. David hit on you again.”

“No, not today, that was last week,” I said.

“And the week before.”

“And the week before that.”

Warren had been way off about David’s interest in just taking care of business. David hit on me--and several other young male employees at WIPE—all the time. I never knew when it was coming or how to deflect it when it did. But I always managed to find a way out. There was the time he summoned me to his office to give me an assignment.

When I walked in, he was bent over the front of his desk with his legs spread wide apart, leaning on his right elbow, looking out the window as if he was enjoying the view. When I announced myself, he took the middle finger on his left hand and began circling it over the bottom of his ass—dead center. A nervous giggle muscled its way out of my mouth. David straightened up, walked around behind his desk and talked about the story he wanted me to write—as if nothing had happened.

06/01/2010

“I’m giving you
some slack. But I want that story by noon sharp,” David said.

“Noon
it’ll be. Not a minute later,” I said, mocking Mr. Wilson Jr.’s tone of
voice, with sniffles and all.

“Richard Pryor you’re
not,” David said, his eyes fixed on me. I hated when he did that.
Although he was slightly cock-eyed, he seemed to be trying to look
straight through me. I felt like crystal. “I saw the home shots. Nice
family.”

“You’re missing the point, Pierce,”
David said, leaning over me at my desk, giving me that look again. His generously applied expensive cologne was almost overpowering because he only inches away. I leaned back in my chair. He was a tall, lean
man. About my size but a couple of inches taller. Even with the cockeye,
women who didn’t know better found him attractive.

“The
point is that a very nice, very ordinary Black woman has worked her way
to a very important position where she can not only witness corporate
power but influence it. If you learn only one thing from working on this
story, make it this: ‘Secretaries are the keepers of the gate to
power.’ If you’re trying to get in touch with The Man, they can help you
or hinder you,” David paused motioning toward Barbara with a slight
smile on his face. “Besides, the story is just three lousy double-spaced
pages long.”

He was right, of course. I began typing.
At that moment, I wanted to leap up and give David a high five.
Sometimes he could be so helpful and then at other times he was, as
Eddie Redmond described him, “the Wicked Witch of the Rest.” But, as
much of a dickhead as Dave could be, he came off as the Black Knight
when compared to Sam.

A few years earlier, Raven
ran an autobiographical feature on Samuele Girma’s life. He was the
mulatto offspring of an Ethiopian warlord who had hopped a steamer up
the Suez Canal for Italy where he went to study civil engineering in
Rome. His mother, Juliana Principe, was the mistress of one of
Mussolini’s most prominent and powerful Representatives of the Confederazione Generale delle Corporazioni until she met Girmaye
Teklehaimanot. To the shock of Italian society, the two married. Girmaye
and his Italian bride moved back to his native Ethiopia in the Trigray
region in the city of Axum.

When
Samuele was eight, the Italian army invaded Ethiopia. Two years later,
in 1936, one of the sacred, 1000-year-old Axum Obelisks was taken in
ruins from Ethiopia to Italy. The 180-ton, 74-foot-tall funerary
monument was reassembled and still graces Rome’s Piazza di Porta Capena
today. Weeks after the Italian army transported the Obelisk out of
Ethiopia, an irate Girmaye sought revenge.

During
one of the Italian Army’s frequent military “show of might” parades in
Axum, Girmaye charged the review stand, on a suicide mission, shouting a
Tigrean war cry. Right after he pulled the pin on the grenade he held
in his hand, he grabbed Mussolini’s top general in a bear hug. Both men
died on the spot. Girmaye became a martyr in Axum. Juliana took her son
back to Rome where they remained throughout War World II. They were
about as welcome as a canker sore on the lip of a beauty queen.

Beyond
the stigma of being a widow and an only son of an infamous assassin,
Samuele had to live with the racism in fascist Italy. The natives had
never gotten over being conquered by the Moors in the Middle Ages.
Nearly half a century later, they were still outraged at the Italian
Army’s defeat in an attempted invasion of Ethiopia in 1890. They
carried, what for some, was an understandable hatred for Africans.
Sicilians, who routinely denied they had Black blood deeply embedded in
their veins, were particularly vehement. So, Samuele had grown up being
taunted as “the poor Moor.” In his late teens, he left Italy for the
states, settling in Chicago.

After a few years and a lot of hard work,
his English was fluent with a barely detectable accent. He studied
journalism at Roosevelt University and right out of college landed a job
at WIPE. After a brief stint at Hep, he was transferred to Raven
where he worked his way up. By natural disposition, Samuele Girma
was sour. He seldom smiled or joked. He was generally inflexible. He was
good at making sure all deadlines were met. Behind his back, we called
him “the Moor Fascist.”

05/30/2010

After much litigation, since his wallet was missing and there was
neither suicide note nor proof that he had purposefully made the jump,
Mr. Wilson Sr.’s extremely generous insurance policy was paid in full.
Grieving but with renewed determination “to build an economic empire in
my father’s name,” Mr. Wilson Jr. finally had enough capital to convert
The Reverie into reality.

“Mr. W. Jr. spent nine million dollars
to turn the Midnight Mansion into the corporate offices of WIPE.
If he had not been a Black man, he would have been recognized as the
financial genius he is, years ago,” Maceo said.

Genius
or not, like Henry Ford or J.C. Penny and other great self-made men, Mr.
Wilson Jr. was a bitch to work for. You either did it his way or you
didn’t do it at all. He knew what he wanted: Money. His employees knew
what was expected of them: To help make him money.

Mr.
Wilson Jr. made his money by adopting established magazine formats from
the Luce family and forging them into new Negro publications in his own
image.

Since the earliest Negro newspapers in the
1700s, the Black press served as an avenue for protest; first, as a call
to end slavery, later as cry against Jim Crow laws and lynching. Back in the early 1940s when
Woodcock Wilson Jr. and Woodcock Wilson Sr. started Colored
Cavalcade, they broke with the Negro press
tradition. Rather than always reacting to white oppression, Colored
Cavalcade ran essays by Negro intellectuals and activists. When Mr.
Wilson Jr. later began publishing Raven magazine three years
later, he dictated that its format focus on Negro achievement. Raven
and the other WIPE publications served as the antidote to the steady
diet of bad news reported about Blacks in the white media.

Raven
was miscegenation of print and photojournalism. There was more space
dedicated to photography in the magazine than there was to text. Every
edition of Raven was chockfull of stories about the first Black
to achieve this and the first Black to accomplish that. It featured
well-heeled and well-educated Negroes in black and white and color
photos. The story didn’t matter nearly as much as the subjects who were
always Black and beautiful. These people were succeeding against all
odds; overcoming all obstacles. Their success was there for other
Negroes to see, read and emulate. For those who were not quite as
singularly successful, each month there was the Raven’s Spectacular
Souls column, which featured seven Blacks that were hired or
promoted to first positions by Fortune 500 corporations—firms that could
then be approached by Mr. Wilson Jr. or his advertising sales director.

“Folks
look at this building and Mr. W. Jr.’s wealth and take it all for
granted,” Ernie said to me one day while I was in his office seeking
advice on how to write a transition between paragraphs in a story I was
working on. “It looks easy now, but it wasn’t always that way. Even
after the man got circulation way up on Raven and Hep, he
had trouble selling advertising. He couldn’t get past
the secretaries in those castles in the sky.”

Ernie got up from his desk and walked past
me. He looked out to make sure no was one in earshot. Just to be safe,
he quietly shut his office door. “But, I don’t care what you think about
him as a boss, the man is cunning when it comes to business. Mr. W. Jr.
began finagling his way into becoming the first Black on one strategic
corporate board after the next. He’d spend more than a year religiously attending
meetings, not making any pitch whatsoever and generously donating. After a while, he’d become friendly with the CEOs on the
board who ran big corporations. Soon, they began approaching him,
asking, ‘Woody, are we advertising in your magazine?’ And, two or three
months later,” Ernie said, “they were in.”

“Slick,” I said.

Ernie
smiled in agreement.

My smile fell away as I thought
about Mr. Wilson Jr., the boss, not the Black business pioneer. “But
he’s such an asshole,” I said.

“If you think its rough
around here now, you should have been here back in the days when he
wasn’t rich and influential. He’d fire people coming and going,” Ernie
said. “Sometimes he’d let go 20 employees at a time. You’d leave work
for the weekend and a Western Union telegram would be waiting on you at home informing you that ‘your services are no longer needed. STOP. Don’t
bother to return to WIPE on Monday to collect your personable
possessions. STOP. They will be mailed to you at your place of
residence. STOP.’”

“Heartless,” I said. Mr. Wilson
Jr. had fired Ernie on two separate occasions, hiring him back a few
weeks later both times.

“That’s why he’s where he is
today.”

“How have you managed to take it all these
years?”

“You’re young. You’re idealistic. You don’t
fully understand what’s ahead for you. Either you bend or you break.
Some choose not to bend. To stand tall. They end up literally or
figuratively broken. I’ve chosen to bend so that I may choose my time to
stand tall.”

05/28/2010

I searched, wondering who would know me at O’Hare. At a table halfway
across the lounge, I saw a hand waving at full mast. Although the
lighting was low, I could tell it was Warren from the bushy profile. He
motioned for me to join him.

“I see you’re stuck here
too,” I said as I sat down at his table.

“Yeah. And I
really need to get back to the Motor City tonight. I’m sorry I didn’t
take the train.”

A waiter came by to take my order.
“I’ll have a Harvey Wallbanger.”

“Another Cutty
on the rocks for me,” Warren said.

After we were
served our drinks, Warren started filling me in on WIPE without my
asking. He’d worked there for a little more than four years before
taking the public relations job in Detroit. Before joining Hep magazine,
he had worked at the Amsterdam News in Harlem for five years.
“WIPE is a great place to work. You’re going to love it,” he said,
checking his watch.

I swirled the straw around in my
glass and then took another sip of my drink through it. I wasn’t sure I
was interested in the job and I didn’t feel comfortable running through
the pros and cons with someone I’d just met.

“The rehabbed
mansion is beautiful. The old man put a lot of money into the place. And
they keep getting more and more beautiful women working around there
too.”

“I noticed. There seemed to be a nice number,” I said,
my interest in the conversation rising.

“A young man
like you will have a great time around there. You can play as hard as
they make you work. Just be careful not to hit on any of Mr. W. Jr.’s
women.”

My right eye twitched. Who were Mr. Wilson
Jr.’s women and how did Warren know they were interested in me at Raven?

“The
job is yours for the taking,” he said.

“This was the
strangest job interview I’ve ever had,” I said, opening up. “I spent the
first 15 minutes of the interview badmouthing the joint and then I’m
offered a job out of the blue.”

Warren laughed. “It’s
the way you’re dressed.”

“What?” I asked.

“I
chatted briefly with David while you were still in the interview with
Samuele and Maceo. That was the first thing he said to me.”

“What?”

“He
whispered to me, ‘You should see the size of the bulge in those tight
knit pants he’s wearing.’”

My eyes went straight to my
crotch. There was a big bulge.

“David is homosexual,” Warren
said.

I didn’t know what to say. So that’s what was going
on. “How many of the women there are Mr. Wilson Jr.’s and how do I
find out who they are?” I asked.

“There are usually no
more than a handful. You’ll figure out who’s who. Just go slow.”

I
nodded.

“Oh,” Warren said as if it had just occurred
to him, “if she’s high yellow, has huge breasts and a big butt, she’s
more than likely one of his. If she has all those qualities and a gap
between her front teeth, she is one of his.”

I motioned
to the waiter to bring us another round.

“Don’t worry.
David’s a pro. He doesn’t let his pleasure come before business.”

05/26/2010

“As we walk around, be sure to notice all the beautiful art throughout our building. This is the most extensive and expensive collection of original Black American art in any corporate setting in the world. We have all the brilliant Black artists,” David said, gesturing grandly at a life-size figure. “That’s an Elizabeth Catlett. I thought Mr. Wilson Jr. was going to have it on display outside my office.”

I stopped to study the piece. It was a polished wood sculpture of a woman standing with her right fist raised in a Black Power salute. I had aced a Black art appreciation class at PSU by talking the talk. “Superb. The carved openings near the top and center of this figure are a penetrating juxtaposition to the protruding contours of the female anatomy,” I started to say, imitating art critic speak, as I examined the work. Not knowing David or his sense of humor, I checked myself and quietly admired the incredible piece, allowing a simple, “Beautiful,” to be said aloud instead.

“But since Verily,” David looked around and whispered, “is Mr. Wilson Jr.’s favorite, he got Homage to My Young Black Sisters.

“As a booby prize, I got Archibald Motley’s The Liar,” David said, pointing at the painting hanging between his office and Samuele’s.

I did a double take, trying to shake off the “six in one hand, half a dozen in the other” thought crossing my mind. From where we stood, David’s office was to the left of Samuele’s. So I couldn’t tell whose was what.

“I guess I shouldn’t really complain. He is an important Black Chicago artist. The colors are so vibrant. The composition is so complete.”

I agreed with him about the colors and composition but thought the exaggerated lips and the image of everybody hanging out at a pool hall was downright Minstrel. Tinsel Town had perfected the images of Motley’s men and put them to action. As Al Jolson had given them voice. Before that, there had been a century’s worth of newspaper cartoonists with like-minded illustrated illusions. I decided I’d best play along. I pursed my lips and raised an eyebrow as if I was expressing some appreciation of the work, then thoughtfully nodded.

“Of course, Mr. Wilson Jr. has the Geraldine McCullough and Richard Hunt sculptures positioned to greet you as you enter his penthouse suite.”

Again, I nodded. At the time, I had no idea who Richard Hunt was but admired his piece. I was familiar with Geraldine McCullough because Raven had run a spread on her a few months earlier, as an arriving Black woman sculptor. I believed, like LeRoi Jones, that every middle-class Black American should have original African-American paintings or sculptures adorning the crib.

“Maceo is only the third executive editor of Raven. The first was Walter Gates. He is this white man Mr. Wilson Jr. needed to help get the company situated,” David said, motioning for me to take a seat at a table as we stopped in the cafeteria. “Mr. Wilson Jr. launched Colored Cavalcade out of the back of his father’s store. Once the publication really got off the ground, Mr. Wilson Jr. wanted a better office space for his business, especially since he was about to start another magazine.

Raven was going to be a big step up, rather than relying on freelancers, he’d have to have three or four writers and editors. He also wanted to move closer to the Loop. This was in the late 40s, not long after the war. A Negro, trying to get a lease at 25th and Michigan Avenue, was bound to be challenged by special circumstances. That’s where Walter became useful.”

“They leased it to the white man.”

David smiled and nodded. “Mr. Wilson Jr. checked out the place by slipping on some coveralls and pretending to be Mr. Gates’ janitor. Then he sent Walter over to conduct the business transaction.”

“How did the realtors react when they discovered Mr. Wilson Jr. was the actual owner?” I asked, lighting up a Marlboro.

“They didn’t. Times were changing. By the time Mr. Wilson Jr. let Walter go several years later and made his financial interests known, the borders of Bronzeville had swelled to more or less swallow up WIPE’s offices. We were destined to be back in the Black belt. Twelve years after Mr. Wilson, Jr. had moved his offices in, Mayor O’Shea had his rubber stamp city council condemned the entire block so that the Stevenson could run through it. The expressway was as effective as the Berlin Wall for containing Blacks. As for WIPE, we moved out and back south to 35th Street—then we moved here,” he said, gesturing with both arms open, as if it was his corporation and not Mr. Wilson Jr.’s. “The second editor was Mona Adams, a brilliant Black woman who was a bitch. We convinced Mr. Wilson Jr. to demote her and decide on us.”

I nodded. “I’ve read Verily Welch since I was in junior high. He’s one of the reasons I decided to become a writer.”

“Verily is a good man, a nice man. But, he’s not that easy to approach,” David said and then smiled. “Don’t you think his first name is unusual?”

05/25/2010

“We’re in a business
that’s populated by professional gossips. We barter in rumor and fact.”—Raejean Corliss

Chapter Four

“Raven is irrelevant,” I said, a few minutes into the
interview. “You’re doing the same stories you were doing when I was
learning my ABC’s.”

“We know we need fresh blood.
That’s the reason we’re seeking out young journalists,” David said. “We
want a new perspective. Times have changed and we’re changing too.”

“The
magazine is superficial. It has no depth,” I said. “It has too much
fluff. These are serious times for Black people.”

Maceo
sat silent. “What do you mean?” Samuele asked.

Before
I could answer, David rapidly rose. “I want him,” he said, abruptly
marching out the room.

What was going on?

I
sat there checking out the interior decoration. Maceo’s office, like
those of the other front-five at WIPE, was well-appointed. It had
oversized windows with a grand view. His office, like the other top
editors, boasted picture telephones—which were decades ahead of the
times. There were 21-inch Zenith color television sets in custom-built
Teak consoles. And there were enough potted plants around to mock the
Garfield Park Conservatory. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I had to
admit I wouldn’t mind having an office with a picture phone, color TV
and a view of the Oak Street Beach.

The interview
continued, shifting directions. They wanted to know how I would like to
see the magazine’s editorial policy change. They nodded as I ticked off
ways I thought would make Raven more relevant. It was flattering
to have these editors seek out my ideas. Maybe the place wouldn’t be
that bad after all.

Fifteen minutes after he
had abruptly left, David returned. He looked at Maceo and Samuele, and
then said to me: “Let me show you around our lovely new offices.”

David
was an engaging tour guide. He dished out company history and details,
pointing out what was produced where and who did what, peppered with
dashes of spicy gossip. He hinted at who was sleeping with whom as he
walked me around introducing me to staff. He told me about the couple
who used to work at WIPE but was fired following a domestic after the
boyfriend was busted for pimp slapping his cheating live-in girlfriend.

He
told me how the mahogany paneling had been imported from Kenya. How
Mrs. Wilson Jr. had made a special trip, along with Samuele, to Italy so
that she could personally select the marble flooring for the lobby from
an Italian quarry. How he personally had recommended the interior
designers to Mr. Wilson Jr. and that they were the same team who had
decorated Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton’s Hollywood home. How the
Wilson’s, Junior and Senior, got the business off the ground after
hitting the numbers and a $727 payoff.

“They were
selling Colored Cavalcade over the counter at their storefront
grocery. They paid friends to go around to other groceries and news
stands in Bronzeville and pretend to be customers, inquiring about the
magazine. Of course, no one else carried it. But, thanks to popular
demand, in no time flat, every grocery store and news stand on the South
Side soon was prominently displaying issues of Colored Cavalcade,”
David said.

05/22/2010

A Raven photog and I spent two days hanging around the DuPuis Motors International headquarters shooting and interviewing Doris Goodfellow, her family, friends, co-workers and boss. She was the daughter of Ephraim Leigh, a Jamaican sugar cane cutter who had migrated to New York. She moved to Detroit from Queens to look after a cousin who was seriously injured in a car accident. That’s where she met Eric Goodfellow, who was also a Jamaican immigrant. They married shortly before she turned 19. She learned typing and stenography at night after cleaning fancy Manhattan apartments during the day.

Mrs. Goodfellow was a plain looking Black woman of average height who wore her hair pulled back in a bun. She was self-contained and demure. Her children and husband loved her. Everyone I talked to spoke highly and kindly of her.

Her job was about as standard as they get. She sat at a secretary’s desk in front of DuPuis’ executive office, which was about the size of a 10-car garage. She answered the phone, screening calls. She greeted visitors. She took dictation in fast and flawless shorthand. She made her boss what he described as “the best coffee I’ll ever have.”

She dropped off and picked up his laundry from the dry cleaners. She picked out the wedding anniversary gifts for Mademoiselle DuPuis and the birthday gifts for the couple’s three children. She set up meetings. She was a good woman who did her job well. But, she did not make, I thought, for an interesting feature story in anybody’s magazine. Not even in Raven.

* * * *

“How are we coming with the DuPuis Motors story, Pierce?” David asked.

“It’s coming. I’m beveling and sanding,” I said, dumping several half-smoked butts from the ashtray into the wastebasket underneath my desk—while I struck up another match to another Marlboro.

That was a wrist slap. Coffee breaks were often the highlight of the day at Raven. We used the time freely by playing rise and fly Bid Whist. While we played cards, we sometimes played the dozens. Sometimes, even when we weren’t playing Bid, the dozens broke out unexpectedly like a fistfight on a playground basketball court.

“Kevin, the headline you wrote for your Natalie Cole story is too stagnant. It needs to be punched up a bit,” David said.

“Yo’ mama,” Kevin responded, not daring to say to David what he really meant: “Kiss my black ass.”

“My mama?”

“Yo’ mama!”

“Yo’ mama so black and greasy they got to roll her in flour to find the wet spot,” David said.

“Yo’ mama so skinny she can dodge rain drops during a storm,” Ernie jumped in.

“Yo’ mama’s ass so big they made it a suburb, named it Bootyville,” I slammed.

“Ooooooooh,” everybody said. “Good one, Pierce.”

In playing the dozens, it wasn’t just the insult that counted. It was also the way you delivered, the cadence of your voice and the speed of your comeback. The dozens was a juvenile, fun game of one-upmanship. At Raven, we periodically did a little signifying as a testimonial to who knows who that we weren’t the condescending bourgeois Blacks we actually were but that we were down brothers still relating to the hood.

And it was during coffee and lunch breaks when we got our soul on a roll; that’s when we had the blood feuds playing Bid Whist. Although the coffee breaks lasted only 15 minutes, we’d manage to play two or three games. My Bid Whist had been okay at PSU where we infrequently played at the student union; thanks to our daily ritual, it became dangerous during my Raven days.

“Did I ever tell you my full name?” I taunted as I waved the King of Spades above my head for everyone to see with my right hand while giving my partner, Darlene, a high five across the table with my left hand. “It’s Pierce ‘BOSTON’ Trotter. And I’m running my middle name right now.”

Our lunch breaks lasted 45 minutes. You could take an hour if you chose to eat outside the mansion. But few WIPE employees exercised that option. The WIPE lunches were comparable to home cooked soul food, subsidized by Mr. Wilson Jr.; they cost us only a dollar a day. The lunch fee was deducted every two weeks from our paychecks. If we went out for lunch in the neighboring restaurants on the Gold Coast, we would have paid six or seven times that much.

05/19/2010

You could wager a year’s salary that virtually every Raven cover
was going to be an entertainer. If the singer, actor or super jock
chosen was just making it to the big time, one of us might have a shot
at being assigned the story. That’s where office politics came into
play.

The cover at Raven, like any other
magazine, was the most coveted story assignment for a writer. Not only
were you guaranteed a byline, but there also was usually a few
paragraphs on the masthead page explaining why the story was on the
front of the magazine and what changes you and the rest of the Raven
staff went through to get it there. The covers to all three WIPE
publications were grandly displayed in the lobby as giant cardboard
mounted blow-ups hanging almost invisibly on 100-pound test nylon
fishing lines. The cover was one of the few times a writer got real
recognition in Raven so it was a sure-fire way to make a name for
yourself. As often as not, Kevin Cook got the cover if the top editors
didn’t.

Kevin had written a pulp novel. It was
one-third porn, one-third mystery. The remaining third was pure ghetto
aesthetics. It wasn’t critically acclaimed. It hadn’t sold well. But,
just because he had published a work, the Tan Troika held him in special
esteem. Novel aside, he was actually a good writer.

Donald
Bidlenson was Kevin’s main competition, because, well, because, he was a
Bidlenson. The Bidlensons claimed to have always been free Blacks,
tracing their roots back to around the Mayflower. Back then, they had
been explorers. Then New England traders. They were Boston craftsmen
later. Then educators. Eventually, they became businessmen. Donald’s
father was a prominent Black attorney in New Orleans. Donald, we
speculated, was having an adventure in journalism before returning to
Harvard for a Law degree so he could take over the family firm. It was
also common knowledge that Donald dined frequently alone with David at
his apartment.

And, of course, being friendly with
David could make a difference in who got what story assignment.

Besides
the Tan Troika, there was Verily Welch and Ernest Hill. Verily was the
nationally noted novelist who was one of the young, intellectual leaders
of the new New Negro movement in the early 1960s. His novel, Better
Now than Later, was one of the staples of all those Black Studies
courses that were popping up on college campuses across the United
States. Had he not been Black, Verily might have been in the league of
Mailer and Cheever. But because he was who he was, writing brilliant
Negro protest novels, he was labeled, and then dismissed, as a
polemicist by mainstream American literati. But in the Black world,
Verily was a literary giant. He was the one and only star at WIPE.

Ernest,
an associate senior editor, was his sidekick. Ernie was a veritable
yeoman who took any assignment thrown at him and did it in a competent
manner. Those two, along with the Tan Troika, made up the front five.
They all had offices with windows overlooking Lake Shore Drive, Lincoln
Park and Lake Michigan’s horizon.

David Farrowe was the wordsmith among the
Tan Troika. He was the most colorful writer and sensitive editor. And
the best gossip. Samuele Girma was in charge of production. He was the
technician who made sure the presses ran on time. Maceo mainly kept an
eye on the big picture and the photographs that helped tell every story.
And, naturally, everybody kept an eye out for Mr. Wilson Jr.

The
day before the DuPuis story was assigned, a car bomb went off in front
of the Hotel Chateau Versailles in Montreal where, on the rare occasion
when there was a story assignment in that Canadian city, Raven writers
and photographers usually were booked.

French Canadian
separatists were engaged in their on-going protests of English as the
predominant language in the Quebec Province. The battle over which
language should be spoken, and where, was a legacy of the 100 Years War.
It was once again entering a violent phase. The bombing leveled almost
all interest at Raven in going to Montreal. In a flash, the most
sought after assignment of the month became the leper of the year. I got
the call.

“This is your lucky day, Pierce,” David
said, as I stood uneasy in front of his desk, waiting to hear why I’d
been suddenly summoned. “You’ve been bugging us about an international
assignment. After a hell of a knock-down, drag-out fight, I’ve managed
to get you one.”

For reasons
I couldn’t fathom at the time, Mr. Wilson Jr. wanted that story, “come
hell or high returns.” The next day, I found myself on an early-morning
coach flight to Montreal.

05/18/2010

Dumb question. The trashcan was overflowing with wadded balls of typing paper and surrounded by nearly as many more on the floor. I ignored her, choosing to take in the streetlights and city skyline in the distance.

“Trotsky, you ought to just finish the piece and get it over with. You have this bad habit of letting the perfect get in the way of the good.”

“You’re breaking my fucking concentration,” I said, yanking the latest partially filled sheet from my typewriter and dropping it on the trash.

What, of any real interest, was there to say about a Black secretary who was recently promoted to executive assistant to Francois DuPuis? He was the story. DuPuis was the internationally honored automobile designer turned magnate. The Canadian nationalist had made it big in Detroit, and then ambitiously set up his homeland’s first independent automobile plant in Montreal.

He named Mrs. Goodfellow, who was his secretary when he was the head designer for GM, to be his administrative assistant at his newly created company. The promotion made her the first Black woman to reach such lofty heights in an automobile corporation. That made her eligible for a four-page spread with pictures in Raven Magazine.

The story came to me by default. It was technically an international piece, even if Canada is just north of the border. Short trip or not, it was what it was. Under normal circumstances, there was no way I would have been considered for the assignment. Senior editors got first dibs on international stories and took them as a birthright. On the rare occasion when they didn’t, the two darlings—Kevin or Donald--of the dynamic duo--Dave and Sam--got the good assignments.

Dave and Sam were both deputy executive editors. They were two-thirds of Raven’s top management team. We quietly joked that Dave and Sam were the flip side to the soul singers, Sam and Dave of Hold On, I’m Coming fame. Their tune, as our signifying version had it was, Come on, they’re Colored.

“They’re Doctor Wilson’s Jr.’s two headed-monster,” Eddie Redmond told me after I’d been aboard about a month. Eddie, who like me was an assistant Editor at Raven, spoke in an imitation Igor voice, low and menacing. “They are co-equals. They’re in this mad, mad I tell ya,” now his voice was pseudo maniacal as he clutched my suit jacket by the sleeve, “competition to see who can kiss the old man’s ass to death.”

I smiled while I shook my head. “So the two are vying to see who’ll get Maceo Richards’ job after he retires.” As the executive editor, Maceo was listed at the top of the masthead in the magazine. But, in reality, the three men shared responsibilities in putting out Raven.

“You got it.”

“That doesn’t make much sense to me. They may be competing to be the boss of bosses but the old man calls all the shots.”

“Bingo,” Eddie said, pointing his right index finger straight up towards the penthouse. “You’re a quick study for a newbie. The Tan Troika is basically three toothless tigers.”

“The Tan Troika?”

“We call Maceo, David and Samuele the Tan Troika because the old man obviously put them to the brown paper bag test before promoting them.”

I hadn’t given it any thought but all three were very light-skinned.

“I hate to bust your bubble newbie, but don’t believe the fair and square fairytale David likes to spin. This is the deal: Dave and Sam skim off the most interesting and exotic assignments for themselves. If it’s an international trip, especially to Europe, one of them will take it. Period. If it’s a superstar, such as a Diana Ross or James Brown, one or the other will assign himself to the story. Bet on it.”

The pattern became clear to me in the months to come. “If it’s some filler about the talented teenage mulatto who is expected to become a professional ballerina, or the 12-year-old Harlem grade school kid who won the national spelling bee, one of us gets the assignment,” said Darlene, who was just standing by.

Like me, she was recovering from being the first Black at a major white newspaper.

A week after she was handed her Master’s Degree in English Lit from Cornell, Darlene Peyton started her internship at the San Francisco Evening Sun. The tabloid was the last paper in town to hire a Black, but Darlene figured that it was better late than never. Her three-month paid internship extended to a yearlong one because they didn’t want to push her too fast. After she was officially hired as a reporter, Darlene became the queen of the spiked story.

Sixteen months later, a few months before I landed at WIPE, she sought refuge from the paper’s benign neglect at Raven.

05/17/2010

I whirled through the glass doors into the vaulted, wood-paneled lobby of WIPE. My mind shuddered.

In a split second, a half-man, half-gargoyle like image flashed before my eyes. My mind shuttered. Zoomed in. Zoomed out. Went out of focus, then into a vortex. Rather than set foot on the black and brown marbled lobby flooring, I imagined myself making a 360-degree revolution. A full speed circle. A blur that moved so quickly I would have gone undetected and Invisible Man. Out. In. Out. I made it only halfway.

Old man Woodcock Wilson Jr. had personally appointed himself the welcoming committee. Again. He stood sternly, skulking in the lobby. Scowling. Taking attendance like some strict schoolmarm in an inner-city elementary school detention class where children were taught to neither be seen nor heard. Ruining days before they began.

“Good morning, Mr. Wilson Jr.,” I stammered, failing in my forced attempt to sound cheerful and glad to see him.

Old man Wilson Jr. sniffed and scowled. He tugged on the thick gold chain dangling from his viridian green vest pocket and then yanked out his fat, glistening gold antique pocket watch. He flipped up the monogrammed cover, studied the Roman numerals on the watch face, and then looked up at the clock married to the rich mahogany wood on the rear wall in the lobby. The clock’s face and frame was a custom-built hanging version of Big Ben. Then Mr. Wilson Jr. glared at me. “Morning? Morning? Why it’s racing towards noon.”

Not quite. It’s two hours and 59 minutes before noon. And for two hundred and fifty-nine bucks, I’ll be happy to take the time to teach you how to tell the time, I wanted to say. Instead I said: “I’m almost done with that story I’m working on. David should have it before noon.”

“That’s strange,” he said, sniffing.

He sniffed a lot. Since he was a child, Mr. Wilson Jr. suffered chronically bad sinuses. “David told me he expected the DuPuis Motors story by 10 sharp. And, I expect…” his head jerked to the right as his sentence trailed off, a tardier employee was bolting through the revolving doors.

It was 9:02. I used that diversion to make my getaway. I skipped taking the elevator for fear that the door wouldn’t open soon enough, leaving me stranded for another lecture about time. I dashed up the two flights of stairs and scrambled to my desk.

“Late again, Pierce?” David said, eyeballing the antique grandfather clock standing guard opposite the third-story stairwell before giving me the once over. I avoided David’s eyes, choosing instead to look at the clock’s second hand as if I wondered if it had skipped a couple of notches ahead of where it should be.

There were clocks all over the place at WIPE. One in every office and another three or four strategically situated on every floor. “There will be no excuse for Colored People’s Time in the Wilson International Publishing Enterprises Building,” Mr. Wilson Jr. periodically pronounced. “We’re as good as Greenwich.”

“Where’s the DuPuis piece?” David asked.

I pulled a slim stack of papers out of my black leather Samsonite briefcase. “You have it for me?” David was surprised.

“Almost done,” I said, waving a fistful of loose papers as if they were a white flag. “I have to polish it up a bit. Bevel it here. Sand it there. Add a little stain. Apply a little varnish. I should have it to you around………noon.”

David literally leaped to his office. I lit another Marlboro and stuck another clean sheet of paper into the mahogany IBM Selectric, exhaling a long stream of smoke as I retyped my lead for about the 69th time. I was suffering from a crippling case of writer’s block. I had stayed at the office until nearly eight Friday night working on the DuPuis story. I still hadn’t, to my satisfaction, gotten past the first sentence. “When it comes to making sure an office hits on all cylinders, there’s no one better than Doris Goodfellow.”

The second sentence kept evolving and revolving. Going all over the map but taking me nowhere. By the time I got to the third sentence, the piece had already revealed itself for what it was. Bullshit. The story was stupid, boring. I had worked on it some more at home over the weekend.

The story was a curse. Allison and I had had a tiff about it. I sat at my gray Selectric in our den, retyping the same page. The same few lines, really. Over and over again. Chain smoking Winstons. Twisting strands of my Afro with my fingers. Shooting wads of half-blank pages at the wastebasket.